After a while, my friends and I thought that the original AA became quite boring.
The same tactics were done over and over again, just because they were the best and only an extremely (un)lucky role on key-battles could shift the war in the Axis favor.
In our opinion the dice rolls don’t introduce enough ‘randomness’ to the game.
That’s why I thought to introduce a pile of ‘weather’-cards which are effective during an entire round (USSR until US) and at the beginning of each round a new ‘weather’-card is turned.
We’re still in the process of testing (mainly how many cards of each type we should make), but at the moment we are quite satisfied with the extra bit of ‘randomness’ which forces a player to change tactics.
At the moment we have the following weather conditions:
1- Heavily clouded skies -> Effectiveness of air units is reduced: -1 on defense and offensive strength of air-units
2- Storm -> Effectiveness of naval units is reduced: -1 on movement
3- Extreme cold -> Effectiveness of tanks is reduced: -1 on movement
4- Clear skies -> Effectiveness of AA-guns is increased: air units are also gunned down at dice rolls 2
5- Normal weather -> No changes
My reasons for each weather effect:
1. in WW2 Air units flew mostly on visibility: Heavy clouds decrease visibility, so that it was harder to hit the target
2. naval units are slowed down by heavy storms
3. during the operation barbarossa, it was clear that many tanks had problems operating under extreme cold. Tracks/gears were frozen
4. air units are easier to see if the sky is clear, they would be sitting ducks for AA-guns
5. I assume that the standard rules were based on standard weather conditions, so normal weather doesn’t affect the unit statistics.
Currently we are testing these weather types 1:1:1:1:3
Perhaps other players would like to test this idea as well, because it takes us a lot of time just to test it. (In my opinion we need many games of testing in order to get a good idea if these ‘weather conditions’ are balanced or not)
